Ellen's Swiss News World
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Wood is back! The Swiss construction industry has been steadily increasing its use of wood to build homes, solo or as part of hybrid constructions with other materials. New figures were published Wednesday 26 September by the Federal Office for the Environment, at the same time that a booklet, “The Swiss People [...]
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The high winds that have been blowing in canton Valais for the past four days provoked a forest fire in Vernayaz/Miéville Saturday 28 April at 14:40. Police in Valais say the fire is under control and no homes were touched by it. It started when high winds pushed over a tree and it [...]
Swiss rental market seeing impact of economic slowdown Tight market for homes keeping prices up GENEVA / ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – New apartment leases in urban Switzerland have risen 10 percent a year in the past five years but this could be coming to an end, according to property consultants Wuest & Partner in their most [...]
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss government has counted the country’s homes, officially, for the first time. The new Federal Register of Buildings and Dwellings statistics show that at the end of December 2009 the number of buildings with residential use in Switzerland was 1,623,000 with a total of 4,008,400 dwellings. Switzerland has a population [...]
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Solar panels have the potential to supply far more home heating, including heating water, than previously thought, a new Swiss study shows. “Home heating that relies entirely on renewable energy, leaving untouched the limited biomass potential, is on our doorstep,” an Energy Office statement on the study notes. Homes in rural [...]
WWF session on building and renovation: how to respect the environment, maintain quality of life Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – WWF Switzerland is hosting a day-long seminar 10 September to show home-owners or those aspiring to buy, how to build and renovate with respect for the environment, while maintaining good quality of life. The programme, at [...]
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Two shelters for abused men are opening this week in German-speaking Switzerland, one near Aarau and the other near Zurich. The shelters are not connected in any way but both are primarily designed for men who have lost their homes and families after separations, says swissinfo, which carries a feature on [...]
The US Army Corp of Engineers lost a court case brought by six plaintiffs over damages from 2005 hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The judge ruled that the Army Corps for 40 years had not maintained a shipping channel between the city and the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in widespread flooding in two areas, Lower [...]
Some 700,000 homes along the coastline in Australia are at risk from erosion as sea levels rise: the government says it expects the level to rise by one meter within 40 years, thanks to global warming. Some homes have already lost substantial amounts of land around them, from storms but also higher water levels, reports [...]
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Homeowners grabbed at the chance to get energy certificates at a bargain rate, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) says, with 15,000 energy certificates sold in only three weeks following the announcement that a certificate and annexed expert report would cost only CHF200 instead of the usual CHF1,200. The cantonal [...]
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